A really kid-friendly meal is Te Maki Zushi (literally “Hand Rolled Sushi”) or Roll Your Own Sushi. It’s a favourite of my nephews and many other kids (and adults!) who come to visit. We just lay a whole lot of fillings out in the middle of the table, put out a couple of big bowls of rice with several spoons, lots of Nori seaweed, soy sauce (or tamari) for dipping, wasabi for those who like a bit of “bite”. Dinner guests then take a sheet of Nori, put some rice on it, put the fillings they like on it, roughly roll it up, dip it and eat it!

Common fillings on our table are:

Japanese style omelet (eggs, soy sauce mirin – cooked into an omelet and cut into strips)
Long thin strips of vegies: e.g. Carrots, Cucumbers, Green Beans, Red Capsicum
Alfalfa sprouts
Tin Tuna
Raw salmon and/or tuna  (except remember all fresh salmon in Oz is farmed)
Strips of chicken breast (boiled in water with soy sauce & mirin)
Avocado
Prawns
Other ideas: left over strips of roast beef, strips of tempeh

The trick for sticky rice is to use short or medium grain rice. For white rice: 2 cups of rice to 3 cups of water. For brown rice: 2 cups of brown rice to 4 cups of water.

Remember for digestibility, the rice should be soaked (especially in the case of brown rice).

[Today I did a quickie version of this for Taiji's lunch but I didn't have any rice so I quickly boiled up some green tea soba noodles to put in instead of rice. It's cheating in terms of indigestible grains but when you're on the fly, sometimes you don't have much choice. The nutritional upside was that he ate heaps of raw vegies that he wouldn't normally eat including lettuce!]

Eh voila!

Filippa pulled out this recipe from Nourishing Traditions for the pizza dough and the topping is a favorite of mine that I have used for years.  The pizza dough was exceptional!  Of course it doesn’t taste like normal pizza dough but the flavour was delicious!  We had our parents round for lunch and even they were impressed.

The theory behind pre-soaking the flour in the yoghurt is that it begins a fermentation process that starts to break down the gluten making the grain more digestible.

The topping combo is a die-hard fave of mine.  I used to use it in a café I worked in and I have trotted it out at many dinner parties and bbqs.  The blue cheese on it is a winner and seems to be liked even by many who are not blue cheese fans.

The recipe makes two good sized pizzas.

Dough
1 cup plain whole yoghurt
250gms softened butter
3 1/2 cups your choice of flour (we used spelt)
2 tspns salt
flour for rolling dough  (or use a bit of oil)

Cream together the yoghurt and butter then mix in flour until well combined.  Cover bowl with a tea-towel and leave somewhere warm for 12 to 24 hours.  Roll out on floured (or oiled) surface and place on pizza tin.  I confess I am a very lazy cook so I just pressed it out onto the tin – worked just as well!  Pre-cook the base in a moderate oven until golden on the edges.

topping

4 tomatoes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
splash balsamic vinegar to taste
splash tamari to taste

Blend tomatoes in food processor then put in pan and simmer until they begin to reduce.  Add tomato paste, tamari and balsamic to taste.  Spread onto pizza bases.

250gms blue cheese
2 medium sweet potatoes
1 large red onion thinly sliced
small handful fresh rosemary
1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts
1 cup grated mozzerella
1/4 cup parmesan cheese

Cut sweet potato into bite sized pieces then roast to desired degree of roastness! Put all ingredients on pizza base then cover with mozzerella cheese.  Bake in moderate oven until cheese is melted and browning on the peaks.

Yum! Yum!

Taiji enjoying raw fish

Here is my 4 year old son Taiji (in his favourite Super-T outfit!) enjoying a quickly put-together sushi dinner. When we mention sushi or sashimi, his eyes light up and he delights in going to the fishmonger with us to buy the fish. It’s so easy to cook up a bit of rice and spread it onto a sheet of nori seaweed. I don’t bother with the usual sushi vinegar flavourings as they usually contain nasties like MSG and I can’t be bothered doing it the proper way with rice vinegar, mirin, sake and salt. Taiji doesn’t know any different anyway! For him, sushi is just something with rice wrapped in nori. Tonight he had ebi (prawn) and raw salmon.

Unfortunately, any salmon you buy in Australia is farmed but if there’s no other suitable fish for consuming raw, we compromise our standards and buy the salmon. Feeding young children can be challenging and if it’s a meal they love and it’s reasonably unprocessed and healthy, well a mother’s gotta do what a mother’s gotta do and raw salmon (albeit farmed) beats KFC any day I say!

Kayo (10 months old) absolutely loves nori! Maybe it’s the iodine or maybe it’s just that she knows what tastes yummy! Her digestive system isn’t ready for rice so I just give her bits and pieces to pick and choose from. She wasn’t all that excited by the sashimi though.

Filippa and I are always looking for new ways to use the kefir cheese and this one works well. Its slightly sour flavour is a good balance for the sweet of the apple and the smoky sage. Roast chicken was always one of my favourite dinners as a child and is a favourite of my children as well.  The aroma of it cooking, the salty crunchy skin, interesting stuffing, roast veggies, lashings of gravy – it is easy to feel soothed here amongst family and friends and nourishing food.

Stuffing
1 slice sourdough rye bread
1 chopped onion
small handful of fresh sage
1 chopped apple
1/3 C roughly chopped walnuts
1/2 tspn lemon zest
Generous splash of white wine
Pinch sea salt
1 egg

Roughly chop bread, apple, walnuts, onion and sage.  Mix everything together – mush up with your hand.  Don’t process or blend the stuffing.  Course texture is great!

Rinse chicken and pat dry.  Push as much stuffing as you can fit into the chicken then wrap the remainder in foil – fold into a package.  Smear Ghee or softened butter onto the chicken skin then sprinkle with flour, sea salt and paprika.  We like it with organic spelt flour, but plain or gluten free works just as well.  A quick gluten free option if you have nothing else on hand is arrowroot.

Bake chicken and roast veggies until cooked to your satisfaction.  Put foil package of extra stuffing in baking pan 20 minutes before removing from the oven. Put chicken on a meat carving plate and allow to sit for 5 minutes before carving.  Keep the meat juices in the pan and add any that comes off the chicken during carving.

Herb and White Wine Gravy

Meat juices
1 Cup white wine
1 Tablespoon tomato paste
Splash Balsamic vinegar
Splash Tamari
1 1/2 Tablespoon flour of your choice
Handful chopped herbs of your choice – sage is great to include to pick up the flavour in the stuffing.

Heat meat juices and white wine on the stove.  Add tomato paste, balsamic, tamari and simmer for 2 minutes.  Put flour in a small bowl and add some of the gravy base, mix to a thick paste, then keep adding extra gravy base until the mix is runny enough to add into the pan. This is to avoid the flour going lumpy before you can mix it in. Stir in quickly, then keep stirring and simmering until the gravy thickens.  Use the same process to add more flour if the gravy isn’t thick enough.  Taste the gravy!  Flavour needs more depth? Add more balsamic.  Flavour needs more salt?  Add more tamari.  Needs to be more winey?  Add more wine! Add chopped fresh herbs and pour liberally over meat, stuffing and veggies.

Enjoy!!

Aaah, kefir! I could wax lyrical about this marvelous health giving drink but I’ll spare you the rave and get to the point. The key to good health is your gut and the key to a good, healthy gut is the micro-organisms that live in the gut. Kefir is a very powerful probiotic drink that can repopulate your gut with all the good bugs. Traditional diets throughout the world all included some form of fermented foods:

Japan – tsukemono (pickled vegetables), miso, soy sauce, natto
Germany – saurkraut
Ukraine – beet kvass
Korea – kimchee
Thailand – fermented fish sauce

And the list goes on and on and on. Yoghurt is probably the most well-known fermented food (besides wine and beer!). Kefir is like yoghurt but the difference is that it has over 30 different micro-organisms compared to only 2 or 3 in most types of yoghurt. Basically, it is a very powerful probiotic yoghurt drink and a lot cheaper than most of the probiotic products that you buy off the shelf in health food shops.

Kefir is a very traditional drink that is consumed all through the Caucasus from Russia through to Iran. Ask any Iranian, Turkish, Russian etc and they know what you are referring to. My friend who spent a lot of time travelling in this region says you can buy it everywhere. Traditionally it was kept in a goatskin bag that hung at the entrance to people’s houses. As people passed in and out of the house, they would give the bag a shake (as this helps the fermentation process). It’s quite sour and on its own, it can be a bit of an acquired taste so most westerners tend to turn it into smoothies by blending other things with it.

What is kefir? Well, it’s a culture that looks like squishy little cauliflowers called “grains” (they are in front of the jar in the photo above). To make the drink, kefir, you put the kefir grains into milk (cow’s milk, goat’s milk or even coconut milk for the truly dairy intolerant) and the fermentation process begins. After 12 to 24 hours, you get a lovely yoghurt consistency. You then pour this through a colander to separate the kefir grains from the yoghurt, pop the grains back into the jar which you then top up with fresh milk. Then to the kefir yoghurt, you add whatever yummy things you like to add to smoothies: banana, frozen berries, honey, etc. We add things like powdered barley grass, freshly ground flax seeds and kelp to turn our morning drink into a Superfood Smoothie. This is how we start our day. It’s satisfying, yummy and your gut loves you for giving it so many good bugs to combat the bad bugs and nourish you back to good health.

Now the other great thing about kefir is that you can strain it to make cheese and whey which you can then use to make all sorts of amazing fermented foods like our favourite: beet kvass or if this drink really doesn’t do it for you, you can make great fizzy juice with store-bought juice and whey.

So, to get whey from your kefir, this is what you do: first strain the kefir through a colander to separate the grains from the yoghurt. Put a colander over a bowl, then line the colander with cheesecloth (or calico or something similar) and pour the kefir yoghurt into it. Cover it up and leave it overnight. In the morning, you should have something similar to cream cheese in the cloth and fairly clear whey in the bowl. Store the whey in a jar and it is then ready to use for fermenting things like beet kvass! We’ll get to the fizzy juices in a later post so stay tuned….

Now if this post has really sparked your interest in kefir, you can read more about it here.

Beet Kvass is a traditional Ukrainian fermented beetroot drink.  Beetroot is packed with vitamins and minerals –  and a couple of glasses of the kvass “is an excellent blood tonic, promotes regularity, aids digestion, alkalizes the blood, cleanses the liver and is a good treatment for kidney stones and other ailments.”  (Nourishing Traditions, p 608).  It’s a great accompaniment to your meal.

I won’t lie to you – this one is not for everyone!  Filippa and I luuuuurve it!!  It’s true – call us weird, call us old-fashioned or try it and maybe you will too!  When I first moved into Casa Araki, we would sip it decorously with our dinner out of wine glasses.  All pretensions to sophistication have long since been dropped and now we happily guzzle from large tumblers.

Every dinner we share with others we take the opportunity to educate our friends on the amazing health benefits of this fermented beetroot drink and sit back watching with interest as they sip it suspiciously. Truthfully, we haven’t made many converts – perhaps it’s a bit of an acquired taste.  Funnily enough our most successful convert to date has been Kayo (Filippa’s 10 month old) who drinks it with relish, hooting happily between sips and kicking her legs with excitement in anticipation of the next sip.

I brew the kvass in a large 3 litre glass jar that has a screw on lid and an inner snap on pouring lid that successfully holds back the beetroot cubes when decanting. When the brew is made we decant into large glass bottles to store in the fridge. Before I found the brewing jar, I used to use a 2 litre glass juice flagon for brewing and would tie some netting over the top when decanting to stop the beetroot pieces tumbling out.

To make beet kvass, you will need:
2 large, 3 medium or 4 small beetroot (increase the number of beetroots for a larger container)
1 dessertspoon sea salt
1/4 cup kefir whey
water (filtered water)
2 litre glass flagon

Finely cube the beetroot – no need to peel them, just remove the tops if they are dirty and give them a wash. Put cubes in flagon with salt, whey and fill up with water. Give a little shake then put the flagon aside in the kitchen where it won’t get in your way. The time it takes to ferment will depend on the climate. In summer time it may take 24 hours, in winter it can take 3 or four days. You need to taste along the way to check. You will know it is ready when it has a rich sour, salty beetroot flavor and a tingle of a fizz through it.

When it’s ready, decant into glass flagons and store in the fridge. Leave 1/2 cup of the Beet Kvass in the brewing jar with the diced beetroot. Add another fresh diced beetroot, 1 dessertspoon of sea salt and fill with water. Put aside to ferment again. After you have done two batches on the one lot of beetroot, throw out the beetroot (compost it!) and begin again. After the first batch has been brewed with whey, each successive batch can be innoculated with some of the Beet Kvass instead.

The hardest thing for Filippa and I is pacing ourselves on one batch so that we don’t drink it all before the next batch is ready!  I wonder if you’ll have this trouble?

Recipe:

12 King Prawns with tails on

4 slices of prosciutto

Sear on bbq or hot plate just before serving

Glaze

1 Tablespoon good quality Mango Chutney

1 Tablespoon Lime Juice

1 teaspoon Fish Sauce

lime zest

mix together and heat gently just before serving

1/4 of red cabbage head

1 carrot

1 red capsicum

1 yellow capsicum

1/2 cup fresh coriander leaves

Finely shred red cabbage, julienne vegetables, mix altogether and add dressing.

Dressing

1 Tablespoon Lime Juice

1 Tablespoon Fish Sauce

1/2 teaspoon palm sugar

1 Tablespoon Sesame Oil

Dissolve sugar into lime juice then add other ingredients.

Arrange salad on plate, place seared prawns and proscuitto on top, spoon over glaze.  Garnish with fresh coriander and finely sliced chilli.

]]> http://2sisters1kitchen.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/kingprawns/feed/ 3 Deborah King Prawns and prosciutto with a lime and mango glaze http://2sisters1kitchen.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/boxing-day-feast/ http://2sisters1kitchen.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/boxing-day-feast/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:47:57 +0000 Deborah http://2sisters1kitchen.wordpress.com/?p=11 ]]>

The picture is of my dad’s birthday cake on Boxing Day. My memories of his birthday through my childhood always involve some exquisite duck dish with an appropriately gourmet starter such as cold cherry soup or lobster salad – something cool and refreshing to sparkle and entice the taste buds in Melbourne’s sweltering summers. 

Catering for dad’s birthday lunch and all the Christmas celebratory feasts of the last few days has had me tied to the kitchen and spending lots of time inventing yummy dishes with our friend Annette.

We have spent most of Christmas at Filippa’s house in the ecovillage in the Currumbin Valley where she and her family live. This has been my home for the last three months, after running from a life that had massively fallen apart. My three sons arrived from WA a few days before Christmas, heralding the beginning of the festivities. It has been a long hard year for the four of us with the end of my relationship with their dad and the complete emotional and nervous breakdown I went through in the months that followed. Christmas, food, family, fun … all have been a beautiful way to shake the year off.

We have hired the community centre in the ecovillage which has been created from the old dairy facilities that existed on the original farm and contains a fully equipped commercial kitchen for our preparations. Lunch is a sit-down affair for 22 guests, including the birthday boy who is turning 77.

We begin with champagne cocktails created with pickled hibiscus flowers giving suitably exotic visuals as the flower floats pinkly in the bottom of the glass. The entrée is King Prawns and prosciutto with a lime and mango glaze on a bed of Asian greens. In keeping with tradition, this year’s duck dish is duck breast with a cherry, port and sage sauce on a bed of braised bok choy served with French roasted potatoes.

To finish the meal off, we have the required fabulously decorated chocolate cake and an old favourite celebratory desert of mine I developed years ago – the Naughty Auntie’s Meringue Cake – a delicious combination of a coffee pecan meringue filled with brandied ganache, cream and summer berries. Foodies being the fashion victims they are, this type of cake is now called a “Dacquoise” — who thinks this stuff up one wonders?!

Annette and her husband Guy and I have had little time to enjoy the meal but the highlight for me is the King Prawns and Prosciutto. Great seafood is readily available here on the Gold Coast and the dish is a wonderful balance on the palate of salty, sweet and sour with fresh crunchy vegetables.

Annette, Guy and I have worked late into the evening cleaning up. Filippa and her family have gone home to bed and my boys have disappeared into the ecovillage somewhere to enjoy the warm balmy air. Over the last few days I have realised that I do not wish to return to the south-west town in WA where I lived. I can’t think of any way to rebuild my life in returning, and everything over here in the Currumbin Valley seems ripe with possibility and opportunities to re-invent myself. For now, it means moving away from my children and the consequences of this will be enormous for us all. In making this choice for myself, they will end up with parents on opposite sides of the country, a situation my sisters and I grew up in and one that I never imagined imposing on my own children.

After the cleaning is finally finished I walk down to the Currumbin Creek which is moments from the front door of Filippa’s house. My boys are building intricate shallow dams that look like Aboriginal fish traps. I strip off and jump in the swimming hole. The moon is almost half full, the evening air is warm and slippery. The heat leaves my body as the creek’s flow entices away the lingering scents of the kitchen. My boys’ calls and their instructions to each other as they negotiate the dam building fill me with a contented joy.

I have just been through the hardest year of my life and made the most difficult decision of my life and there is yet more of an emotional rollercoaster ride ahead of me. I have no way of knowing how this will all play out but in my heart I know my decision is right.

I went vegetarian at 14 and was on and off vegan for the next 17 years until finally I had literally had a gutful of my health problems (more on that later). Seven years ago, I got into a totally different way of eating based on raw milk, meat, fermented foods and traditional fats. Not only did it sort out my health problems but I discovered the joy of feasting on really good, traditionally prepared food like the feast we had on Boxing Day for our dad’s 77^th birthday.  Now, that’s not to say that decadent chocolate cake and Deb’s famous Naughty Aunty’s Meringue Cake are healthy, but I have learnt to be less rigid and part of being healthy is also allowing yourself to have treats from time to time – especially at gatherings with friends and family.

When Deb came to stay with us and took over our kitchen and our stomachs, we soon realised what a perfect combination our skills and interests were – my nutritional knowledge and her cooking talents so, on this blog – Two Sisters One Kitchen – we are setting out to share this journey with you. Come for the ride with us and learn about how to create delicious and nutritious dishes.